ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G Motherboard Review

How long ago was it…less than two years ago, that the naysayers had written AMD off. There was a time that I had my own fears, but I didn’t pay attention to those that had decided that AMD was going to disappear. Most of them were Intel fanboys anyway, and had no idea whatsoever what was happening inside of AMD.

But look at them now. The Phenom started out troublesome, but the Phenom II has been very successful, so successful that AMD has released the third round of new Phenom II processors. AMD has three successful chipsets for those processors, the first one (780) was good enough to base the second two (790 and the new 785) off of the original. A few months ago, their ATI division released an entire new generation of graphics, both gaming and mainstream.

Yeah, right, it looks like they are about to collapse.

Some weeks back I looked at an mATX AMD 785G economy motherboard, supporting AM3 processors with DDR3 memory. It was a very impressive board with a very impressive price. Performance and stability easily met my expectations, and it will be the standard for any other 785G board that I get my grubby little hands on.

Today I will be looking at a full ATX 785G motherboard by Asus, the M4A785TD-V EVO. It is definitely nicer than the mATX board I just mentioned, with much nicer cooling and CrossfireX support. It supports DDR3-1800 memory (requiring CPU overclocking). All this at a surprisingly economical price. Read on to check out the Asus M4A785TD-V EVO!

Packaging:
As this board is an economy board, it gets Asus’ economy motherboard packaging. The box is AMD green, and is fairly covered with features. The rear of the box is the same, a nice photo of the board and the rest is specs and features.

Inside, the layout is typical, the motherboard is enclosed in an Asus static-free bag, and protected from the bundle by a layer of cardboard.